


Talk Some Sense to Me

by WeDidItKiddo



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Late Night Conversations, Wedding, Whipped Cream, cottage by the lake, how in the hell did he get under there, is scott the groom or not, who is she marrying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-12 20:14:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18017696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeDidItKiddo/pseuds/WeDidItKiddo
Summary: “Scott?”“Under here,” he grumbles, like she could’ve avoided landing right on top of his head when she didn’t even know he was there in the first place. “Damnit, that fucking hurt.”Tessa’s head appears upside-down in the space between the floor and the bed moments later, her eyes going wide in the dark. “Scott?” she utters again, like she needs the confirmation it’s actually him hiding under her bed. “What in God’s name are you doing under there?”Or: The story of how exactly Scott ends up under Tessa’s bed the night before her wedding.





	Talk Some Sense to Me

**Author's Note:**

> ... You might want to read the thing at the end before you start yelling? (And then you can come and yell some more, if you want ;))
> 
> (Title from "I found" by Amber Run.)

_The Virtue cottage, Bayfield, Ontario_

_May 2022_

 

 

The entire house is dark when Scott jams his foot right between the corner of the couch and the little side table that’s placed inconveniently right behind it, and whose existence he’d forgotten about right up until the moment a soaring pain shoots up his leg and makes him whimper out loud.

_Fuuuuuuuck._

Heat shooting up his back, he clenches his teeth as not to wake up the whole house and focuses all his mental energy on a breathing exercise he’s only ever done once before with their mental prep coach, Jean-François Ménard, during one of their Friday sessions years ago. The counseling sessions have all blended into one, distant memory by now, but funnily enough the tips and tricks and breathing exercises had started to come back to Scott in waves over the last few weeks.

Not really surprising given the circumstances, but annoying nonetheless.

“ _Fuck_ me,” he mutters when it becomes clear the breathing is not helping the pain in his little toe subside _at all_. There’s a dull throb by his temple as well, caused by the cumulation of a few shots of gin, a cocktail he doesn’t recall ordering but distinctly remembers chugging down faster than Chiddy, and a couple of beers earlier in the evening.

If anyone were to ask him whether the bachelor party was a success, he’d wholeheartedly answer _yes_. Mainly because they didn’t run out of alcohol before Chiddy was convinced they would, but also because they spent the largest part of the evening on the pebble beach by Tessa’s cottage, one of his favorite places in the world.  

Now, a few hours later, his mouth is dry and his legs feel a little like jello. He would very much like to pretend he’s making this trip to get a glass of water and some Tylenol for the headache he's anticipating, but that’s not how this ordeal started.

It started with Chiddy stirring him awake from a gin-induced sleep ten minutes earlier, frantically whispering the words  _Do you remember where you put the ring?!_

He’d been awake instantly, because it wasn’t until Chiddy had said those words that he remembered he did _not_ , in fact, remember where he put the ring. In his momentary panic, he’d grabbed onto the nearest thing he could find – a can of whipped cream – and after turning upside down the entire room he shares with Chiddy, Eric, Luis, Jeff and Andrew, the panic had taken him to the living room. He’s scoured every inch of the place by now except for the kitchen, but to no avail.

In his tipsy-edging-on-drunk state, he is still holding the whipped cream in one hand, pointing it at the side table like he’s going to attack it for attacking his little toe.

The house is dark, but luckily it isn’t completely quiet. At least three people in the living room are snoring loud enough for his soft cursing to go unnoticed as he slightly alternates his course and slips around the side table, avoiding arms and legs as he dashes to the kitchen.

By the time he reaches the fridge, he’s passed at least one Moir and two Virtues. For reasons unknown, even to himself, he pulls open the double doors of the humongous fridge and peers inside, slowly coming to realize as the cold air slaps him in the face that no one in their right mind would keep a box with a wedding ring in the fridge.

Well, except for Tess, maybe, who has a weird habit of keeping her car keys on the bottom shelve of the fridge so she doesn’t forget them.

When his search of the vegetable drawer ends in unsurprising disappointment, he pulls out a bottle of water, fills up a glass, steadies himself at the sink and downs it in one go, his gaze focused on one of the lounging chairs on the patio. Even with the alcohol numbing his senses, he still feels like smashing the can of whipped cream through the window.

If only he wasn’t so _goddamn_ nervous.

As soon as the thought crosses his mind, he puts the glass on the counter and shakes his head, knowing damn well his determination to ban the nervousness from his mind is as fake as every excuse he’s made for himself since that one chapter of their lives ended in Pyeongchang four years ago. He got pretty good at that, actually: faking it until he made it.

He absolutely hates it. He hates making the conscious decision to change the way people perceive him when he’d rather just dump all his emotions onto them with no filter, raw and vulnerable and real.

 _Aight, time to break up the self-pity parade and think about what really matters this weekend_ , he thinks to himself as he puts the empty glass in the sink and heads back upstairs. _All of this will be worth it in the end._

Rationally, he knows those words are true; things will be easier after this weekend. He’s known that since he had handed out the smooth, thick envelopes she’d so carefully picked out to his family three months ago and his brothers had clapped his back like he’d accomplished something, which he didn’t feel like he had. Everyone knew it was bound to happen anyway.

So why does it still feel like he’s teetering on the edge of a cliff, threatening to tip over if he loses focus for just a second?

 _You’re pathetic, Moir_.

The voice in his head is his, but for a moment it sounds an awful lot like his brother Danny’s.

A fresh wave of anxious thoughts is cut short when he reaches the first-floor landing and passes the second bedroom on the left, which he knows has been Tessa’s for as long as her family has owned the cottage. Her door is ajar, and his gaze cuts to the room before he can stop himself.

The possibility that forms in his head has no logical reasoning behind it, but in his intoxicated state it makes sense: _Maybe I accidentally left the ring in her room._

His feet have passed the threshold before the rest of him can catch up with what he’s doing. In the back of his mind is the realization that walking into her room is just the next in a series of bad decisions – which include losing the one thing he was supposed to keep safe – but the gin makes it easy to block that out.

Unlike in the other rooms in the house, there are no extra air mattresses scattered on the floor here with sleeping family members. The room is empty, which Kate had insisted on when they were sorting out the sleeping arrangements for the weekend, telling everyone “the bride needs her beauty sleep before the big day”. Scott had watched Tessa open her mouth to say something but change her mind at the very last second, probably deciding that agreeing was easier than fighting her mom’s decision.

When he blinks, the cold from the floorboards seeping up his bare feet and mildly throbbing little toe, he realizes with a funny jumpy feeling in his chest that the sheets in the bed are pushed aside and that Tessa is nowhere to be seen.

He snorts, even though he doesn’t find it funny that he’s clearly not the only person in the house who’s too nervous to sleep.

“Right, where are you, you little devil…” He starts tiptoeing through the room, figuring he has at least a few minutes before she comes back and not even considering the fact that she might be seconds away from walking in on him. He has searched the most obvious hiding spots – drawers, pockets of a pair of jeans thrown over the chair in the corner, the inside of a decorative vase - fairly quickly, but with no success.

Goddammit. He stands in the middle of the room, twirling the can of whipped cream between his fingers and thinking really hard about where else the ring could be, when the can slips out of his hands and bounces onto the carpet next to Tessa’s bed, where it rolls over the edge and disappears underneath.

 _Oh_.

He looks down at the spot where the whipped cream disappeared and heaves a tired sigh, putting all the blame on the can and none on himself for dropping it. He shrugs his shoulders, not thinking terribly long about his decision to drop to the floor and take a peek under the bed before he’s squishing his face against the carpet.

The can is out of his reach, sadly, so the next logical step, he figures, is to crawl under the bed.

He’s just flattened himself on the floor and slid toward the wall close enough for his fingers to touch the can when the door creaks behind him, announcing Tessa’s return.

Almost instinctively, he freezes in place and strains his ears to listen, because _heck_ yeah, he knows he’s not supposed to be hiding under her – or anyone’s – bed in the middle of the night, and _heck_ no, he’s not going to tell her he maybe/probably/definitely lost the ring. She’d kill him before he would be able to get the words out.

His mind is already racing to come up with an escape plan as he watches her walk back and forth a few times. When she stops near the bed, he swallows and slightly raises his head – a decision he regrets seconds later when all of her weight drops down onto the mattress.

The bed frame knocks him hard in the head and he hits his chin as he ducks to the floor, the dull throb by his temple exploding into the kind of headache he was only expecting the following morning.

“OUCH! God _damnit_ , T!”

Tessa and the rest of the room seems to freeze for a moment as he clamps his head and chin in agony. Then, as if reality only catches up with her two seconds later, she sharply sucks in her breath and shifts over the mattress.

“ _Scott_?”

“Under here,” he grumbles, like she could’ve avoided landing right on top of his head when she didn’t even know he was there in the first place. “Damnit, that fucking _hurt_.”

Tessa’s head appears upside-down in the space between the floor and the bed moments later, her eyes going wide in the dark. “ _Scott_?” she utters again, like she needs the confirmation it’s actually him hiding under her bed. “What in _God’s_ name are you doing under there?!”

“Getting the can of whipped cream,” Scott says as he rubs the back of his head, but even to his ears that doesn’t sound like a very plausible excuse. “Look, it’s a long story, I promise you don’t want to hear it.”

“Uh…” She gapes at him for a second, blinking a few times as her hair slips off her shoulders and gathers around her head like a halo. “I just found you hiding under my bed in the middle of the night, so you better have a damn good story to explain how you got there, Moir.”

“Or else?” he challenges her, knowing perfectly well he’s not in any position to bargain. (He can pretend, right?)

“Or _else_? There is no ‘else’. It’s nearly four a.m. and you’re lying wide awake under my bed. Are you drunk? How much did you drink tonight? You know just as well as I do that this is the last place you’re supposed to be right now.”

“And _you’re_ not supposed to leave your room at all tonight,” he counters easily, mentally giving himself a pat on the back for thinking so quickly despite the fuzziness of his head. “You never know who you could run into.”

“Meaning?”

There’s a hint of amusement slipping into her voice like it’s an inside joke between them, and any form of enthusiasm coming from Tessa is the best kind of encouragement. “Meaning it was probably a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea to let your fiancé sleep in the same house,” he says, playfully pointing the can of whipped cream at her. “It’s bad luck to see each other the night before the wedding.”

She chews on her lip, like she’s purposefully trying not to smile at him. “Am I not allowed to go to the bathroom anymore? Besides, if no one else knows about it, does it really count if I _were_ to run into him?”

“Like the calories don’t count when no one sees you scarfing down three donuts?” He knows he’s talking bullshit now and that he should probably get out from under Tessa’s bed and head to his room, but if he’s honest with himself, going back to his half-deflated air mattress in a room where he has to endure Eric’s snoring is the last thing he wants to do. If he can stretch this any further than he knows he should, he will.

“Exactly like the calories,” she says, putting a hand on the floor and craning her neck to make sure she doesn’t hit her head when she starts sliding off the bed. “Come on, let’s get you out from under th-”

“No, not yet.” The words come out without thinking, too fast, too impulsively, but he can’t fake it with her. He knows he can’t. “Come join me for a second, it’s nice down here,” he hears himself saying, not sure if he’s digging an even deeper grave for himself or actually managing to persuade her not to kick him out just yet.

For a split second, there's a familiar glimmer in her eyes and his heart flutters, but then she shakes away the look on her face. “Scott, I need more alcohol in my system to crawl under a bed with you.”

“Said no one ever after a bachelor party.”

“A bachelor party during which I did not get drunk, thank you very much.”

His lips curl into a mischievous little smile. “There’s no spiders under here, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

He knows she is, even if she rolls her eyes like the suggestion alone is ridiculous.

“The dust isn’t that bad either,” he adds for good measure, waving the whipped cream around like he owns the place. (He’s clever enough not to mention the lack of space and the mild feeling of claustrophobia creeping up on him.)

“Scott, come on, this is ridiculo-”

“Do you remember that day we technically went missing for like half an hour?”

She pauses, her shoulders stiffening out of surprise and then visibly relaxing. “Yeah, I do, actually.” Her eyes narrow ever so slightly, like she’s wondering where he’s going with this.

“Come here,” he says a little softer, tapping the floor next to him. “Just like old times.”

When she holds his gaze, it’s the first time in years that he can’t tell what she’s thinking. She’s slid off the bed and onto the floor by now, chewing on the inside of her lip and probably wondering if she would technically be breaking any rules by joining him in his antics.

She hasn’t always joined him in the past. More often than not, she’s tried to do the exact opposite and keep him from doing something stupid, or getting in trouble.

Not tonight.

“Fine,” she sighs, rolling her eyes at him to make sure he knows she still thinks this is ridiculous. She lies down and shuffles under the bed until her arm is pressing against his, warm and comfortable and almost relieving in a way. “God, it’s been ages since I’ve hidden under a bed. But you were right about the dust, it's not too bad.”

“Twenty-five years, to be exact,” he says contemplatively. “That is, if you haven’t hidden under a bed with anyone else in the meantime – in which case I would be terribly disappointed.”

“Twenty-five years? Really?” She focuses a little too intensely on the bed frame above her, but so is he; they’re both avoiding the other one’s eyes like they have an unspoken agreement not to look at each other anymore until she walks down the aisle tomorrow. “Were we really just eight and ten at the time?”

“We must’ve been,” he says nonchalantly, even though the memory is etched so clearly in his memory that he knows exactly what age they were.

He knows, because it was the winter after he broke up with her over the phone.

It was a Friday afternoon, just after four o’clock, and they had just picked Tessa up from school to drive to the rink when his mom realized she had a dentist appointment she’d completely forgotten about. Scott and Tessa were sent to the basement with Charlie to watch over them, but they’d snuck off to his room once Charlie had left to make himself a sandwich because that’s where Scott kept his secret candy stash.

It was in his room that they confessed to each other how neither of them really felt like going to practice that day. That only rarely happened, and when it did, it was usually something they quickly got over once they stepped onto the ice.

Not that day. They sat on Scott’s bed eating Sour Patches and Maple Kisses and talking, more easily than they ever had – every day it became easier to talk to her – until Charlie suddenly banged on the door.

Scott had frozen with the pile of candy scattered over the comforter between them, looked up at Tessa, and wiped everything onto the ground in one swoop.

“Hide,” he’d said, jumping onto the ground and swiping the candy under his bed. She’d crawled under the bed with him, even though there was no real reason to hide, and when Charlie had forced the door open, they’d both stayed completely silent.

Scott feels the smile on his face spread as he imagines what Charlie's face must’ve looked like when he found the room empty. They’d stayed under his bed for at least half an hour before anyone suggested to make sure they weren't just hiding somewhere. It was one of the only days in their entire career where they missed practice because they were grounded.

“Gosh, we were so naïve,” he sighs, his chest heavy with nostalgia. “And stupid, I’m not ashamed to admit that now. If Charlie hadn’t stayed calm when mom came home, she absolutely would’ve called the cops to report us missing. We’d never done anything like that.”

“Do you still have that tiny red backpack we ended up using to stash away all the candy?”

He turns his head to look at her, surprised she remembers that. She swallows under the pressure of his piercing eyes and picks at an imaginary dent in the bed frame before she finally meets his gaze. He can see the memory of that day lighting a fire in her eyes, and it’s like firecrackers are going off in his stomach.

He smiles. “I do. My mom has always kept it on top of my wardrobe in my old room, until this day.”

“That’s funny.” She holds onto his gaze for a few more seconds before turning away from him. When she blinks heavily, it’s not just dust she’s blinking away. “I haven’t thought about that day in years.”

“Me neither. Must have something to do with this weekend, eh?”

“I guess,” she agrees.

“Twenty-five years,” he says heavily. He shakes his head and presses the can of whipped cream to his chest. “Jeez, that’s a lifetime. Actually, I should probably thank you, because not many people – including my mom – can say they still tolerate me after twenty-five years. Hat off to you, Virtch.”

“I think you’ve thanked me enough to last a lifetime, Scott.” She laughs, and they’re probably the only two people who can hear it in the space under the bed.

And then her fingers slip through his, the same way they are able to find each other on the ice even when they aren’t looking. She sighs, long and heavy, and Scott allows himself to take another glance at her, even though he probably shouldn’t.

She hasn’t changed one bit she was six years old, and at the same time she has in every way. She’s fiercer. She’s braver. She’s so much more confident. She’s just as giving as she used to be.

 _Why bother with Instagram filters when you have moonlight and dark bedrooms_ , he thinks, momentarily distracted by the shadows cast over her face and the tight knot that used to be his stomach _._

The soft knock on the door snaps him back to laser-focus. Next to him, Tessa freezes.

“Scott? Dude, are you in here? Did you find it?”

Chiddy.

He turns to Tessa, who’s staring back at him in the dark, and shakes his head ever so slightly. _Don’t answer_.

She doesn’t.

The next moment, the door opens and Chiddy steps inside, hanging onto the door handle so it creaks under the pressure. “Tess? Scott?”

Tessa covers her mouth with her hand to keep in a laugh and it’s like they’re eight and ten years old again, hiding under Scott’s bed while Charlie sets into a slight panic in the doorway when he finds the bedroom empty.

“Where in the fresh hell did they go this time…” they hear Chiddy muttering to himself. He's staying in the safe zone near the door where he’s not invading the private space of Tessa’s bedroom, but not exactly staying in the hallway either. He dawdles in the doorway for another moment before turning around and retreating into the hallway.

When the room is quiet again, Scott glances at the door one more time and then picks up the conversation like they were never interrupted.

“It’s funny, because it’s one of the things I couldn’t stop thinking about when we were in Korea. Remember those few days we spent in Seoul?”

“What is it you couldn’t stop thinking about?” She’s distracted and more cautious than he is by nature, which is why she’s still watching the door to see if Chiddy will come back.

When it’s clear he won’t, she lays her head down and gives his hand a squeeze to assure him she's listening. Somehow, he manages to make the words come out casually.

“I just started thinking about how a person can go back to real life after making such a deep connection with someone, you know. Like, skating together was all we knew for twenty years minus-the-two-in-between-we-won’t-talk-about.”

“Mhm.” She’s back to chewing her lip, eventually turning to smile at him. “I think we’ve done pretty well, don’t you think?”

He nods, despite feeling like he's not telling the whole truth. “Yeah, I think we have.”

“Do you really?”

“Yeah, we’re doing all right.” He tears his gaze away from her and looks up at the wooden salts over his head. “I mean, it could’ve been worse. I could’ve sunk into an early midlife crisis and bought three Ferrari’s, but I didn’t.”

She lets out a laugh. “Let’s face it, you would’ve bought the Leafs before spending every dollar of your money on _cars_.”

“Wut?” He spins his head around quickly, giving her his best insulted look. “ _Hell_ no, the Leafs are worth far more than I would ever be able to afford.”

“Fine, you’re probably right – except for the midlife crisis part.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He can feel something more serious coming and the only way he can pretend not to care is by acting silly, so he prods her ribs with the cap of the whipped cream. “T-bone? T-girl?”

“Well, I think you went through _some_ sort of crisis when we first got a feel of what real life was like,” she says, not falling for his attempt to distract her and swatting the can away from her ribs. “The two years we won’t talk about? Yeah, they were pretty bad.”

_As if he needed the reminder._

He makes a hissing noise, copying her behavior from earlier and reaching for an imaginary dent in the bed frame. “Fine, touché. Whatevs.”

“What?” she says, because his voice sounds flatter than he intended and she knows exactly when to be alarmed.

“I don’t point out your insecurities, you don’t point out mine, ‘kay?” He tries to keep his voice light this time, but he only halfway gets there.

“Oh, come on, I was only messing with you.”

“I know that.” He pauses, then releases another long breath. “I thought it was going to be epic, but I hated it.”

“What, real life?”

“All the things I thought I would love about real life. Not being in the public eye all the time, going to parties, getting drunk... All of it just made me feel like shit most of the time."

Silence. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

He squeezes her hand automatically, much like the urge to say sorry was probably instinctive for her as well. “Why are you sorry? It wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t know, maybe I…” She stops, then starts again. “Maybe we should’ve figured it out together back then. I sometimes regret that we didn’t, you know?”

He does know. He knows that Tessa is a fixer, and that she feels terribly guilty when she can’t do something to fix a thing that’s broken. But what he knows now, and what he knew after Pyeonchang but didn't after Sochi, is that he would never have been able to get his life back on track if he hadn’t made all those mistakes first and learned from them.

He lets the silence settle between them for a moment, because despite the uncomfortable topic, he doesn’t _feel_ uncomfortable. He closes his eyes and ticks off all the boxes in his head: his breathing is even, his heart isn’t thundering in his ears, and he doesn’t feel like sprinting out of the room.

The only thing bothering him is the pain by his temple that has shifted to the back of his head, where it simmers like an itch he can’t scratch.

“You were better at it than I was the second time around, though.”

His eyes fly open. “Better at what?”

“What you just said. Going back to real life.”

He’s suddenly very aware of the clamminess of his hand – maybe the subject is making him a little uncomfortable after all – but he doesn’t want to let go of her, so he starts massaging her fingers instead. “If it seemed that way, that was only because I _wanted_ you to think I was dealing well with everything after Pyeonchang. It took me nearly a year before I finally started processing things and getting into a rhythm, my mom can attest to that. And then… well, we all know what happened then.”

“Mhyeah,” she huffs out, and he doesn’t need to look at her to know she’s smirking.

“Want some whipped cream?” he asks her, knowing his question is completely off topic but determined to keep that smile on her face and move to safer ground. He’s already going in to spray some in her mouth when there are obvious footsteps in the hallway, and she stops him by grabbing his wrist.

“I think you should probably go and tell Chiddy where you are before he thinks you took off.”

“Really?” He pouts, suddenly feeling irrationally giddy again and not ready to go back to his room yet.

“Yeah, I think it’s for the best. Besides, it's a big day tomorrow.” She presses a kiss on his cheek and smiles, starting to slide back out from under the bed.

He decides to follow her in the end, be it a little reluctantly, because he knows she's right. He’s just flipped onto his stomach when-

_The ring._

It’s right there in his reach, in the space between the bed and the nightstand. Suddenly channeling his inner Gollum, he shoots forward and grabs the box, a move that is so not subtle that Tessa is cocking a brow at him when he emerges from under the bed.

“What was that for?”

“Nothing,” he replies smoothly but with guiltily flashing cheeks, slipping the box in the back pocket of his pajamas. If she notices his sudden eagerness to get out of her room, she doesn’t mention it: she walks him to her door, pretending to ignore the way he’s refusing to walk forward like a normal person and keep his bulging pocket out of sight.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says when he’s standing in the doorway. Her eye twitches and flicks in the direction of his pocket, but once again, she doesn’t say anything.

“See you there,” he says awkwardly. “You’ll be the one in white, right?”

“Obviously,” she says, refraining herself from rolling her eyes at him and leaning against the doorframe. “Do you have everything you need?” she asks when he’s still standing there even after saying goodbye, referring to whatever it was that made him crawl under her bed in the first place.

The ring is in his pocket and the can of whipped cream is in his left hand, but he shakes his head and it's like he's in a dream, a very rebellious, exceptionally impulsive dream. And like in any dream, he's not the one calling the shots: he's already closing the distance between them when the word is still leaving his mouth.

“No.”

His lips lock with hers. He doesn’t think about the taste of alcohol in his mouth or the thin fabric of his pajama pants, because it’s all her, all Tess, all lips and teeth and then tongue, meeting him just as rebelliously in the middle. It’s quiet in the hallway, and his headache has vanished by the time he forces himself to let her breathe. She’s all it takes to sober him up.

He tells himself it’s a breathing pause, but the air is tentative, a question mark rather than a full stop. She’s trapped his arm behind his head against the doorframe but she doesn’t move her mouth away from where she’s breathing heavily against his cheek, which he thinks is a good thing.

His kiss was a question, and it wasn’t a rhetorical one: _she’s_ the one who has to answer. He won’t do it for her.

Her hand doesn’t release his arm, but the other one drops from his chest to grip his shirt and pull him closer. _Maybe._

It’s not enough and he’s never been very patient, especially when he’s had a few drinks, so he leans in again despite the pressure keeping his arm behind his head. She doesn’t back away and instead gives in almost immediately, like she needed him to push her over the edge, his head now exploding with exclamation marks and all things sinful and unholy.

Lip between his teeth. Hands in his hair. Hot breath in the space between their mouths, his or hers he doesn’t know.

He knows the exact moment it’s over, because his back goes cold. She’s miles away before she’s let go of him.

“Bad luck,” she whispers, almost sheepishly, but it’s a reminder: something to fill a void he’d rather fill with silence, because silence has no punctuation at all, and no punctuation has worked for them in the past.

“Bad luck,” he echoes, stepping away from her with a smile. Three steps and he knows she won’t ask him to stay. Six steps and he’s sure he won’t go back to her room.

He’s standing in the dark watching the shimmer of her eyes disappear behind the door when he stops.

“Tess?”

The gap widens a few inches. “Yeah?”

“How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How did you get over breaking up with me over the phone when you were eight?”

Her lips part and she squints at him.“I was eight.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

When she shakes her head, it's a move so subtle he's not sure he just imagined it or not.

“I didn’t have to.”

**Author's Note:**

> I can almost hear your screams in the virtual distance: WELL OKAY KAREN BUT WHO IS SHE MARRYING? IS IT SCOTT?? IS IT SOMEONE ELSE??? CARE TO EXPLAIN???? and if that rings true to you, I've accomplished exactly what I set out to do. (Cue evil laughter - but not really.)
> 
> I wanted you to ask those questions. I wanted you to wonder: Is he nervous because he's marrying her the next day, or is he nervous because he's about to lose her? Are things going to be easier after this weekend because he can finally tell the rest of world and he doesn't need to fake it anymore, or are they going to be easier because he can move on from her? Is it bad luck to see his bride before the wedding, or is it bad luck because she's lying under her bed with a guy who's not the groom? Did she not have to move on from him because, duh, she was eight and she never really fell in love with him, or because they've finally found their way back to each other and there's no heartbreak to move on from? And lastly... did he maybe ask that question because he wants to know how to get over her?
> 
> I purposefully stayed vague about all of those things, because guess what? I don't know. I started writing this thinking I was going to go either one way or the other eventually, but that never happened. And I still don't know.
> 
> I think at the heart of this is the message that things will always be the same between them, whether they marry another person in the end or not. That connection, those memories, the inside jokes, the twenty years of skating together? They're never going to change. 
> 
> So. We don't know. In real life, we might never know. And however you wish to interpret this, that is my answer to all your questions (unsatisfying as it may seem).
> 
> I'm sorry? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
